The UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) is seeking to fast-track approval for lab-grown (“cultivated”) meat and synbio (“precision fermented”) food by slashing UK regulations surrounding novel food and feed products, as well as food additives. This will also involve less oversight for GMO foods. As part of the regulatory streamlining, the FSA is proposing to fast-track novel food approvals by relying on other countries’ regulators. In the case of synbio food, this could see the FSA depending in particular on the judgements of regulators in the US, which has already approved several such products for sale and consumption. In the case of lab-grown meat, Israel and Singapore, as well as the US, have been the first to approve lab-grown products. The FSA’s director, Rebecca Sudworth, justifies such dependence as avoiding pointlessly duplicating the work of “another trusted regulator”. It seems certain the US will be high on the FSA’s list of “trusted” regulators, and that is bound to set alarm bells ringing not just in the UK, but in any other countries tempted to follow this model. Recent testing revealed that a synbio milk that was accepted by the FDA as safe contained a large number of unexpected substances that could potentially be allergenic or toxic. GMWatch

 

 

When it comes to GMOs, French retailers say they are guided by two main principles: the application of the precautionary principle, and the traceability and consumer information. In France, this stakeholder in the agri-food sector has reservations about the proposed deregulation of GMOs. In June 2023, at the invitation of experts from the French food safety agency ANSES, the French trade and retailing federation (Fédération du Commerce et de la Distribution, FCD), currently chaired by the CEO of Carrefour, shared its thoughts. While the FCD has not taken a formal position on the deregulation, the organisation and its members have reaffirmed two principles which are “important” to them and which guide them: “the application of the precautionary principle and the notion of transparency and traceability". However, these two principles are not reflected in the European Commission’s proposal, which plans, on the contrary, the end of risk assessment, labelling, traceability and post-market monitoring. For the retailers, the detection and traceability of GMO/"new genomic techniques" (NGTs) are essential to “be able to detect the presence of NGTs, whether for control purposes ... in relation to the various links in the chain, or for the detection of adventitious presence due to cross-contamination. For us, detection and traceability are essential in the context of these future developments". Inf'OGM

 

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